Man Powering Canoe with Outboard Motor on Southern River, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Man Powering Canoe with Outboard Motor on Southern River, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Man Powering Canoe with Outboard Motor on Southern River, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-AA0260

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Somewhere on a tannin-brown river in what reads like the American South, a man in a yellow shirt has done what American men of the 1950s did the moment outboard motors became affordable and reliable: he bolted one to a canoe, which was designed for neither the speed nor the stress this arrangement produces, and opened it up anyway. The canoe is planing hard, its green bow lifted clear of the water at an angle that would have alarmed its original designers considerably. This was the decade when small outboard motors — Johnson, Evinrude, Mercury — moved from sporting luxury to hardware-store staple, and the logical conclusion was that any vessel that could accept a transom bracket was now a powerboat, whether or not it wanted to be. The man sits with the calm posture of someone who has done this before and found that the canoe has not yet capsized, which he takes as engineering validation. The wooded bank behind him is indifferent to the question of whether this was a good idea, which history has declined to settle definitively.

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